46 cents a year per person is all it takes to fund something that gives people the chance to create art. That’s 0.004 % of the overall national budget. The National Endowment for the Arts helps give people the opportunity to create art, ranging from music to dancing to arts education and more.

Created in 1965 by congress under President Lyndon B. Johnson, the NEA has funded a lot of grants. From 1995 to 2015 the NEA has provided 187 million dollars in grants for arts in California. Recently, the NEA’s future has been called into question because 45 doesn’t think it’s important. He has proposed eliminating it from the budget in 2018, although this is not his design to make as congress writes the budget.

The NEA has been threatened before when (quite surprisingly to me) Ronald Reagan proposed getting rid of the NEA but faced a Democrat controlled congress. Currently, the Republicans have an advantage as they are in control of both houses in congress and the presidency.

Society as a whole benefits overwhelmingly from the arts. Arts are a part of culture and culture is what makes people and places unique. Preserving arts and allowing them to be pursued allows the story of America to be told in a creative way rather than reading it in a history book. You can put on a song from the 1920’s and hear the atmosphere and the things that were going on in society at the time. You can watch movies from a long time ago and see how they’ve evolved over time. There’s so much that can be told through art that it needs to be taken care of.

If you have a problem with funding someone’s art project or because you don’t see how your money is making an impact. Then research what the money goes into and go check out the projects that are being created from the money. You can very easily see the things that your money is going towards by doing a quick google search.

As a kid who grew up playing Trumpet from 5th grade to senior year of high school to now as a 20 year old adult trying to get into the music industry, the NEA is important. It needs to be protected against people who don’t understand the importance of art and what it does for people. Art preserves culture from one period of time and shows it off in another period of time and that’s a pretty cool thing.